Best golf courses near Sheboygan, WI

Pete Dye transformed a dead flat abandoned army air base along a two-mile stretch of Lake Michigan into an imitation Ballybunion at Whistling Straits, peppering his rugged fairways and windswept greens with 1,012 (at last count) bunkers. There are no rakes at Whistling Straits, in keeping with the notion that this is a transplanted Irish links. It has too much rub-of-the-green for the comfort levels of many tour pros, which is what makes it a stern test for top events, such as three PGA Championships, the 2007 U.S. Senior Open and 2021 Ryder Cup.

The Irish Course has the same manufactured dunescape found on its more famous sister Straits Course, but with three major differences. The fairways are bent grass, not fescue. Carts are allowed, although confined to cart paths. (It's walking only on the Straits, thought both 18s are relatively easy to walk.) And the Irish has the only blind par 3 found at Whistling Straits, the 13th playing 183 yards over sand hills to a huge green ringed by more than a dozen bunkers. It doesn't get more Irish than that.

Not much is known about Harry Smead, the architect who built Pine Hills in the 1920s. Compared to his contemporaries, his portfolio of courses is small and quiet, with one exception: Pine Hills. Pine Hills is an eruption of contour as holes are draped like linen over brawny knees and elbows of earth. Fairways pitch this way and that going where the land takes them, and Smead's greens are miniature versions of the natural movements, full of swales, knobs and dips. The first hole sets the tone, a par 4 that banks of slopes like a roller coaster swooshing into an elevated green. The fourth, coming back the other direction, tackles the same topography, pitching off the opposite tilt, plunging down toward a tabletop putting surface. The par-3 fifth looks like the slalom course climbing steeply toward a jetstream green. And on it goes. Drew Rogers has been tending to the course over most of the last decade, polishing this and burnishing that but leaving the remarkable green contour alone. A notable improvement was removing the forest of trees along the inside of the curving par-4 18th, exposing the ravine on the left and giving players something sinister to think about as they tee off. If Smead had designed more courses like this, we'd know his name as well as we do Perry Maxwell or Seth Raynor.

Only Pete Dye could have convinced owner Herb Kohler to rip apart an award-winning course (Golf Digest’s Best New Public Course of 1988) and still come out a winner. Dye coupled the front nine of that original 18 (now holes 1-4 and 14-18) with nine newer holes built within a vast bend of the Sheboygan River to produce the River Course. It possesses some of Dye’s most exciting holes, from the triple-option reachable par-4 ninth to the boomerang-shaped par-5 11th to the monster par-4 18th, where Kohler surprised Dye by converting a long waste bunker into a temporary lagoon for tournament events. For major events, like the 2012 U.S. Women’s Open, Dye’s original 18 was used. But for survey purposes, Golf Digest evaluates the River 18, which is available for everyday general play.

It’s not wise for a rebel force to stand toe-to-toe against an empire—success depends upon more radical measures. In the case of The Bull at Pinehurst Farms, the empire is the late Herb Kohler’s neighboring 36-hole Blackwolf Run (plus the 10-hole Baths course), not to mention Kohler’s Whistling Straits complex just north of Sheboygan. To make The Bull equally attractive, Team Nicklaus went full commando with the design, using all the available assets of the 400-acre site to build broad meadow holes in the meadows, tightrope holes through the woods, and shorties along and across the winding Onion River. Traps are sprung everywhere—in the form of pot bunkers, inside doglegs, draped in front of greens—and numerous ravines are positioned to ensnare miscalculations. There’s a lot going on, but as they say, when you take on The Bull, you get the horns.

Even before Pete Dye completed the River Course at Blackwolf Run, he had taken the front nine of the original Blackwolf Course (Best New Resort winner of 1988) and merged it with a newly-constructed nine to form the Meadows Valley Course. Although the Sheboygan River isn't in play as much on Meadows Valley as it is on the River (the 18th hole plays over it), there are plenty of deep bunkers and tricky pin positions.